


In the Desert, Waiting for Rain

by Skaldic_Jedi



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Angst and Feels, Angst with a Happy Ending, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Post-Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, Short One Shot, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-30
Updated: 2019-12-30
Packaged: 2021-02-27 10:08:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,185
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22025326
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Skaldic_Jedi/pseuds/Skaldic_Jedi
Summary: Rey searches for meaning in the aftermath of Exogol and discovers that a Force dyad may even be stronger than death.
Relationships: Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 8
Kudos: 54





	In the Desert, Waiting for Rain

**Author's Note:**

> I'm sure there are a ton of fics already that take place following the end of TROS, but here's mine! That film was a LOT, and like Rey in this piece, I needed to process my feelings about it. Obviously, spoilers for the final movie ahead.
> 
> Enjoy!

* * *

The grief comes after. 

After the celebration and the embraces, the tear-joined smiles, the reluctant goodbyes; after Rey buries the only remains of two of the finest rebels the Galaxy has ever known in the desert, closing their shared grave over with sun-warmed sand; after she takes his ancestral name, the way she wishes she had taken his hand at the end and made him stay, somehow, some way—

_Ben._

Then the grief.

#

Days are long on Tatooine, but the nights feel longer still.

She sleeps little. Wanders outside mostly, exploring the farm in the cool of the evening dark, driven by the need to search, to find. Rey isn’t sure what she’s looking for exactly, but on the first night she encounters a pale eopie on the edge of the property, ragged and starving. Lost, maybe. Separated from its herd, or from an owner. She tries to get close enough to feed it something, but it runs, startled by her scent or perhaps something else about her.

On the second night, she finds the bones of some old moisture vaporators and starts the work of repairing them. Habit, more than anything. The itch to fix something. She didn’t come here—to this empty planet, to this empty place—with the intention of staying. It was meant to be a pilgrimage of sorts, although she realizes now how foolish that idea was. There is nothing sacred or hallowed about the old Skywalker homestead. It’s just rock and dirt and sand. People made it a home, people now gone. But she’s here now, so she might as well make it her own.

In the morning, she sets out food and water. Both go untouched throughout the day. The eopie never returns, and neither do Rey’s other ghosts. Luke and Leia may as well be wind.

In truth, they’re not who she’s longing to see, anyway.

Nothing in her ancient texts explains how Force projection works, or even how death works for the Jedi. Nothing she can understand, anyway. Most of the texts are in languages she can’t read, and the pictures can provide only so many clues. C-3PO probably could have provided a translation, but the droid was halfway across the Galaxy, and anyway, Rey isn’t sure she wants the answers to all of her questions.

#

Waking is always a shock, even weeks on. No one could have anticipated what the loss of her dyad would be like, but to Rey, most days Ben’s absence feels like a sharp edge, like something broken off inside her—something missing. A limb, a sense, like the space around her is abscessed, wrong. 

Even before her eyes open, she reaches for him; without thinking, desire or need. She reaches for Ben like she would a breath, instinctively. All the times before, he was there. A steady dark limned in amber gold. The potential of him felt huge and powerful and, yes, sometimes frightening and terrible as well, but in the end she had been right to trust him. He had turned, just like she saw in her vision. He had brought her back from the dark.

“Ben,” she whispers. Her heart pounds in the silence, waiting for a reply. “Be with me.”

It worked once. No reason, she thinks, for it not to work again.

“Be with me.”

Her eyes are still closed, breathing shallow. Maybe it’s her imagination, that tickle of Force energy that slides towards her. Almost like someone passing nearby.

_“Be with me.”_

She concentrates, pictures the boyish relief in Ben’s smile after they kissed, like everything was finally right, at long last. Did he know, even in that moment, he was dying? He must have felt the last of his life energy leaving him, yet there had been no fear in his eyes, or resentment, or grief. Only peace.

For a long moment, there is the same silence that has followed her all her life. The sound of alone. Tears press against her eyes. After everything she’s done, everything she’s become, after _everything_ … she’s right back where she started. A lonely girl in the desert, huddled in the corpse of something past, hoping for the one she loves to come back to her. 

Why had she believed coming here was a good idea? 

Luke said the legacy of the Jedi was failure. But it isn’t just the Jedi. It’s the Skywalkers, too. She sees the truth now, here where it all started, here where the walls still wear Imperial scorch marks. The legacy of the Jedi is failure, and the legacy of the Skywalkers is death. To be destroyed by their passions, and destroy others in turn.

And now she is both. A Jedi and a Skywalker.

And somehow she is _still alone_.

“Rey?”

His voice is quiet, but unmistakable. Rey’s eyes fly open, and she jerks upright in her sleeping roll. “ _Ben?_ ”

Ben Solo turns in a small circle, gaze searching, like she is still coming into focus just as he is for her. He’s faint at first, little more than a blue glow inside her dark cave, but as she stands to approach him, he grows less spectral. The shape of his face and body form, exactly as she remembers, and a tightness in her chest she hadn’t known was there suddenly loosens.

She longs to reach out to him, touch him, but she’s not even sure that’s possible, and she can’t bear to watch him slip away again, everything he is gone between her fingers.

Ben’s forehead folds into deep trenches as he takes in the space around them—what is barely a room by most definitions. “This is wrong,” he says. “You don’t belong here.”

“Because I’m a Palpatine?” 

She doesn’t mean to sound defensive. It just comes out, a reflexive kick.

His eyes are as soft as his tone, the deepness of his voice almost a purr. “Because this place belongs to the dead, not the living. You should be somewhere green and blooming. Naboo. Chandrila. A planet with a future.” He steps towards her, completely filling her vision with radiant light. “You deserve more than sand and ghosts.”

“So do you,” she says without thinking, the space inside her darkened by guilt. 

He was right before: this is all wrong. Him, dead; her, alone. It’s not the ending either of them wanted—certainly not the future they both believed they were moving towards. Maybe a true Jedi would be able to accept what’s happened and find peace, but she can’t. She doesn’t want to. It’s not in her to quit. To just give up.

“Rey.” He says her name like it’s enough, like she doesn’t need to be anything more, anyone else. Just—Rey. “I’m sorry... I wasn’t strong enough to change sooner. I’m sorry I couldn’t stay.”

She hears the same ache in his words that she’s carried since Exegol. The same bleeding wound. His agony cuts deep, sharp as a vibroblade, and if she wasn’t so scared of him disappearing, she might have looked away, too grieved by his pain.

Instead, she asks in a small, hesitant voice, “Will you stay now?” and holds out her hand, just as he had to her, what feels like a million years ago, while the old world around them had burned and the new seemed doomed to repeat the same mistakes as before. She couldn’t take Kylo Ren’s hand then, but maybe Ben Solo can take hers now. “Please?”

“I want to. You know I do,” he says quietly, as if afraid of breaking the spell of their unexpected reunion. “But what you’re asking…”

“It sounds impossible, I know,” she adds hastily, almost desperately. “But when I called on the Jedi of the past, they answered me. And when I called to you just now, you came. We’re connected, Ben. The Force wants us together.” _I want us together_ , she thinks but does not say. Isn’t it obvious, her feelings for him?

“Connections break,” Ben says, and he sounds like Kylo again. Angry. Doubtful. Mistrusting. She knows its only his fear, and the shame of it, motivating him to say these things. The words of a boy whose master failed him, and whose parents sent him away the first chance they got, who perhaps were not ready for a child at all, especially one so powerful in the Force. He glares at the sand-flooded floor, and his voice is barely a broken whisper. “Bonds fail.”

“Not ours,” Rey insists, and his gaze rises, fragile with hope. “Now give me your hand, Ben Solo, before I change my mind.”

After a moment, a sliver of a smile makes it to Ben’s lips. “Yes, empress.”

“I’m going to ignore that.”

She wriggles her fingers, fighting her own smile as Ben’s widens to a familiar grin, and once more, he stretches out his hand to hers.

#

The next binary sunrise sees the eopie’s miraculous return to the homestead. 

Rey is elbows deep in one of the moisture vaporators, parsing through its baked guts, still trying to restore power when she hears the creature nosing through the food she’s left out. This time she stays hidden, and doesn’t interfere, not even after the eopie guzzles the last of the water and turns back for the desert. At least this might give it one more day. Sometimes all you can do for another soul is buy them a little more time.

“She’ll make it,” Rey declares confidently, speaking of the eopie. “She just needs some help until she finds her way. But she’ll get there. She’ll find the ones she’s lost—or they’ll find her. She’ll make it.”

“I didn’t say anything,” Ben says from beside her. It’s still a surprise when he appears, but a pleasant one.

“You never have to. That should be obvious.” Rey smiles. The day is still young, its heat gentle, and the man she loves has come back to her. How can she not smile when her heart is so full?

Ben’s steps don’t disturb the sand even as he comes towards her. “What am I thinking now?” he asks, his voice a sultry promise. The skin around his eyes crinkles in a restrained smile, the glow of his gaze undulled even in the shadow of the vaporator. 

To anyone outside of their dyad, she must look like a girl talking to ghosts. But when she steps forward, Rey feels Ben’s arms come around her, solid and strong. His kiss is gentle, a test to see if it’s even possible, and then to see if she feels the same. Luckily, she doesn’t mind the act of convincing him.

Afterward, although she cannot hear his heartbeat when she rests her head against his chest, the swirl of Force around them pulses with rhythmic life.

And this—not the showy destruction of some old evil or a ceremonial burial in the desert—this is how they begin to make things right. No longer separated by some cruel twist of fate, but together, as they were always meant to be.

#

Hope begins again.

It begins, just as in Luke’s story and his father’s before him, with leaving Tatooine. Leaving behind the past, and burning space until they see stars.

Inside the _Falcon_ , Rey watches in silence as Ben journeys from room-to-room, sliding his hand along the instruments on the wall—sometimes touching, sometimes merely passing through.

The years fall away from him, all the darkness vanishing from his face. He looks hale and youthful again, and ultimately relieved, like a boy home at last. She insists he takes his father’s seat, and eventually he does. Ghosts shouldn’t be able to cry, but tears streak down Ben’s face as he reaches for the pair of golden dice dangling nearby. Despite repeated attempts, he cannot grab them. Rey has to assist, holding the gambler charm out to him in her open palm. Only once she has made the offer is he able to finally take them.

“Thank you,” he whispers, and she knows he doesn’t just mean for her help with the dice.

She bends her head toward his, enjoying the closeness, even when they aren’t directly touching. “Well?” she asks after a moment. “Where to, Captain Solo?”

Ben chokes on a laugh. “Please don’t call me that.”

“I’ll accept a truce on nicknames.”

Still smiling, Rey charts a course to Naboo and together they make the smooth jump to hyperspace. Rey’s heard Naboo has beautiful waterfalls, lush jungles, and an underwater network of cities. She’d like to see that, and now she can. The future need not be a cobbled image of the past, but something new. Entirely hers, and Ben’s.

That first night he came back to her, when Ben’s ghostly fingers slipped over hers, catching suddenly, there was a question in his eyes: _how?_

_How is this possible?_ but also, _How can you love me?_

Rey remembered asking him the same silent question on Ahch-To, as a cold, wet girl sitting in the shadow of bright flame, as a nobody. _You aren’t alone_ , he’d told her.

And now she isn’t.

END

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Universe in Shadows](https://archiveofourown.org/works/28389558) by [Rosamund_Calais](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rosamund_Calais/pseuds/Rosamund_Calais)




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